Kay Redfield Jamison

About the feeling of mania, Kay Redfield Jamison wrote in her memoir An Unquiet Mind, “When you’re high, it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones.” Diagnosed with manic-depressive illness in her midtwenties, she currently serves as a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and is a leading expert on the illness. Jamison published Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Creative Temperament, a work of nonfiction, in 1993 and a second memoir, Nothing Was the Same, in 2009. The author of numerous books, she was listed among Time’s “Heroes of Medicine” in 1997.